the dreaded blue screen has emerged!

This is a discussion on the dreaded blue screen has emerged! within the Tech Board forums, part of the Community Boards category; So our computer for no reason just terminated. It starts up in safe mode, but we can't find anything wrong. ...

Not sure what to do, but the 0xC0000005 means that it tries to use memory at an invalid address.. 0x0000001E, which is the bugcheck error means that this happens in kernel mode.

In this error code, the fourth number is the address the code tried to access, and the second one, so code at 0x804200E4 tried to read or write to address 0x0000001D, which unsurprisingly failed.

If you have a second machine, you can use WinDBG to find out which module is loaded at 0x804200E4 [and even which function that is].

As to how to fix it ... Does it boot in safe-mode? If so, replacing the driver that causes the fault could be an idea. It may be a registry setting that causes a problem for that particular driver [e.g. something changed the "how much memory my driver should allocate" from 100K to 10000000K - which obviously doesn't work, and there was no good checking for that situation, so it fails].

It is certainly the problem of a device driver, since the basic difference between safe mode and regular mode is that safe mode doesn't load kernel mode device drivers. Have you lately updated/installed/reconfigured some device drivers?

I had a similar problem with a board mounted modem before. Is this your case? If so, try to uninstall the drivers from the Device Manager (right-click on My Computer>Properties>Hardware) and then reboot. When windows finds the new hardware install from your computer drivers cd.

One of the biggest problems with Windows is that it doesn't actually remove the driver files when you delete the driver, which can cause problems later. If you can, get rid of all the driver files. You could use an install monitor to monitor what the heck it installs.

It's amazing how much difference just wiping out old files can help, since it helped me get rid of the blue screen when installing the sound drivers.

The old Win98 trick of deleting the folder where the drivers are also works unless of course they were put into System. Sometimes Windows continues to use the old folder even if you try to install new drivers. Not sure why this bug was never squashed.

Amazingly, we unplugged it, cleaned it up a bit (we have a dust problem ) and plugged it back in, and all signs of the problem went away and now it works. We did clean uninstall and then reinstall the drivers like mario said though, maybe it's really what did it. Thanks for the help.